Over the past two months I have been locked in the deadly support ticket battle with the mysterious Steam Support team. It all started one day when in an effort to eagerly get Call of Duty 4, I decided to use steams digital download services. As expected every thing worked fairly well until when I went to authenticate, the game could never contact the “key server”. I tried over and over, but with little success and eventually resorted to looking at the FAQ/Knowledge base provided by Steampowered.com. I did every step they had there; plug the computer into the wall, restart the modem, dance in a circle, etc. Still, nothing worked. Finally I got angry enough to submit a help ticket.
Now enter the world of the Steam help system… It is a cold and lonely place. Your only correspondence is through email that you get sporadically throughout the week. There is no phone line, there is no chat room, there is only silence and the hum of your computers as you patiently wait for an email. As the email goes, the staff handling it merely copied and pasted FAQ remarks to my legitimate questions. I went through three emails with them before the answers started to cycle back over again.
So like any good American I called up my bank and told them that I did not receive a usable product and would like to refute the charges. Considering my bank is an awesome bank, they happily stopped payment and prevented steam from getting at my money! I went out the next day and bought a hard copy of CoD4 installed it and went on my merry way.
A month past, and between raiding in WoW and handling normal life issues, I finally got a break to play Team Fortress 2. I started to log in when I noticed that I had gotten an error pop up from the steam client. At closer examination I noticed that it said my account had been disabled….!!!WTF!!
I clicked on the link it provided and the familiar help ticket system popped back up. The panic began setting over me; I could literally feel it like a veil being pulled over my head.
Et tu Steam!
It seems that steam was going to have the last laugh and boy did the guys at steam bring the pain. My first clearly annoyed ticket rambled on trying to explain in rather lengthy detail how I was displeased and how could this happen to my account. I got a simple cold and short reply back from the ticket system, “Your account is in dispute, due to you owing money”.
How could I owe them money? Then it hit me, they must be talking about the CoD 4 issue. This made me very angry so I put a few choice words at how I was extremely disappointed in their help system and explained how all of this was their fault….of course steam coldly replied that I would have to work it out between the bank but the charges still remain. It became clear to me that steam was playing hard ball, so I called up my bank and asked what the status was. Like the kick ass bank they are, they would not pay steam as per my guidance. I felt a bit vindicated but I was left in the situation were I quickly began to realized that I could no longer play any of my steam games.
As it turns out Steam has a strict policy that if your account is disabled (the polite term for banned) that you can’t play any of their games. One would have thought that I would have saw that coming, but sadly I didn’t. I began submitting tickets pleading my case but got the same standard reply, “Your account is in dispute, due to you owing money”. This went on for the past month, and finally I broke down and told the bank to pay the charge. I put in the ol’familiar help ticket and seemingly quicker than before, got a response with an attachment that I had to sign and snail mail back to them.
In no less words, the attachment made me sign a statement that said “Steam was correct in charging me $49.99. I will pay the price in full.” It was as if I was in a bad war movie were my capturers were trying to make me sign false documents. I swallowed my pride and signed away. Two days latter I was able to play my steam games.
Now the Heat!
I’m all for digital downloads and ease of content distributions so our brothers and sisters in other countries don’t have to pay import taxes and gamers can get that “new game fix” on with the quickness. However, I’m not for the nightmarish poor support Steam has to offer. I tried and tried but never got a good number for the help department at steam. The bastards probably outsourced their support staff. It blows my mind that a company that provides digital download to millions of gamers can’t afford a call center!!
It also angers me that Steam naturally assumed that the problem resided on my end, and never provided me with more than one level deep explanation on how to fix the problem. When the problem still persist, what next? It’s not like you are chatting with them, instead you email each other with adding to the customers frustration.
Come on Steam you can do better!!
I learned my listen and will from here on out buy all my games to preserve a hard copy on hand to avoid any authentication issues. Granted I have had numerous happy stories of downloading games from steam, but this previous experience left me a bit burned.